P3s in the News

Feb 07, 2014

Here is a short list of public-private partnerships (P3s) Concordia had its eye on this week.

Pay for Success

There are many examples of P3s in infrastructure development worldwide, but far fewer examples of P3s in social development. Because of that, it is welcome news that the state of Massachusetts is partnering with Third Sector Capital Partners to address the state’s problems of crime recidivism in the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Pay for Success Initiative. Working with Roca, an NGO that helps disengaged, disenfranchised young people move out of violence and poverty, this partnership will fund high-contact interventions with 929 at-risk youth mostly in Chelsea and Springfield, MA. The goal of the project is to reduce incarceration and re-incarceration by 40% among these youth over the next decade. If successful, the project can be expanded to an extra 400 people in surrounding localities. The project is largely financed by the private sector. Among the investors, Goldman Sachs will provide loans of $9 million, The Kresge Foundation and Living Cities will invest a total of $6 million, and other foundations will provide grants of $6 million. Like many P3s, the risk for this project is shared among all parties, and the private sector loans will only be repaid if certain benchmarks are met that directly lead to savings for the state.

ConnectED, announced Tuesday, February 4th, is a partnership designed to modernize American public schools, allowing for increased access to technology for 15,000 schools and 20 million students. According to President Obama, this will enable more creativity in the classroom and help build a better workforce.

Some of the commitments include:

Apple donating $100 million worth of iPads, MacBooks, and other products to schools across the country.

Sprint will provide free wireless service for up to 50,000 low-income high school students over the next four years.

AT&T will donate over $100 million worth of wireless service to middle-school students.

Autodesk will make its 3D-design software available for free to every high school in the country.

Microsoft will offer products like Windows to students and teachers at a deep discount, and provide 12 million free copies of Office to our schools.

O’Reilly Media and Safari Books Online will donate more than $100 million worth of eBooks that will help students learn technology skills like coding and web design.

Verizon will expand a program to help train educators to use all these new tools in all 50 states.

From the press release:

Our schools were designed for a different era – based on a limited school day and a seasonal calendar. This system does not take into account the constant learning opportunities of global connectivity, and does not prepare our students for a collaborative and networked economy.

We must make our schools an integral part of the broadband and technology transformation – particularly when that same technology can be harnessed to drive empowered, more personalized learning. From digital textbooks that help students visualize and interact with complex concepts, to apps and platforms that adapt to the level of individual student knowledge and help teachers know precisely which lessons or activities are working, this technology is real, it is available, and its capacity to improve education is profound.

Accelerating Medicines Partnership, a groundbreaking P3, was announced Tuesday by the National Institute of Health. Ten rival companies joined a pact, along with seven foundations, two trade groups, and two federal agencies will work together to discover new treatments for various diseases.

INDUSTRY TRADE GROUP: Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health

From the press release:

The National Institutes of Health, 10 biopharmaceutical companies and several nonprofit organizations today launched an unprecedented partnership to transform the current model for identifying and validating the most promising biological targets of disease for new diagnostics and drug development.